Erewhon Kenobi

“If every city has a culinary punch line, it’s easy to identify Los Angeles’s: Erewhon, the cultish chain of grocery stores, where a half gallon of ‘hyper oxygenated’ water will run you an unconscionable $25.99. It started, in 1966, as a bean-sprouts-and-bulk-bins health-food stall in Boston, the brainchild of Japanese immigrants who evangelized the macrobiotic diet. Since then, it’s moved West and morphed into a slick, high-end wellness behemoth—a constant site of workaday paparazzi photos, a case study in capitalism posing as counterculture.” Hannah Goldfield in The New Yorker: How Southern California became the epicenter of hype diets and twenty-dollar smoothies. (FWIW, I think the Hailey Bieber ‘Skin Glaze’ Smoothie is a bit overrated.) “A tour through Erewhon is a tour through the cultural pathologies of the day: seed-oil paranoia, Jordan Peterson-influenced masculinity panic, gratuitous self-medication for the remote-work set.”